Do Cats Hear With Their Feet? - Tumblr Posts

Thus the domestic cat is not so much a true domesticate, one might say, as it is what Juliet Clutton Brock categorises as an ‘exploited captive,’ a group that includes reindeer, yaks, camels, and ilamas along with cats. Clutton Brock isn’t wholly comfortable putting cats in the same category as yaks or camels or with true domesticates like dogs. They really fit in both categories, she says, and might better be called ‘exploiting captives.’

“Exploiting captive”

The jig is up, Cat (the name of the cat) knows. He’s been spotted by the finch in the tree. The bird’s alarm call is really an emotional response to the irritation it feels on seeing the stalking cat, and not probably the deliberate and altruistic work of a guard on duty.

Do cats hear with their feet, Jake Page

He waits, immobile, eyes fixed in the direction of the unseen mouth of the burrow.

He waits. Minutes pass. He continues to wait, utterly mo-tionless, listening.

And finally, after a few more minutes, he gives up on this burrow and trots off to a farther pasture. There he locates another burrow ("an interest in locus" in science-speak) and waits a few feet away from it in the tall grass, staring from yellow eyes, the black pupils large in the gathering dusk. He listens to the high-pitched voices of mice and presently he hears the scratching of small feet in the dirt. Every cell of his body seems focused on the mouth of the burrow. The sound of the tiny feet changes as they go from dirt to grass. Cat springs, pounces, and seeing now the furry juncture of head and body, he clamps down, eye-teeth sinking in, severing the mouse's vertebral column at the neck. The mouse instantaneously goes limp, dead.

Cat is suddenly afflicted by a sense of confusion. What should he do with the mouse? He bats it with a front paw and it flops over. Cat is not hungry. He has no urge to eat the mouse.

But there it is. Caught.

He picks it up by the scruff of its broken neck and begins to trot back to the house through the tall grass and into the unmowed yard to the back door. He pays no attention to the alarm chirts of the house finches. He pushes through the dog door into the house, and sets the mouse down on the tiled floor near the clothes dryer. The urge to hunt has been fulsomely assuaged. Cat pads into the living room where he rubs himself against Susanne's ankle, purring, at ease.

Excerpt from Do cats hear with their feet?, Jake page